This week President Trump said the USA would withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. This is a decision that caused many different reactions from people all over the world. Some people were pleased by the decision while others were angry over it.

Don't think anyone should be too surprised to hear I'm livid over this one. Shortsighted, selfish, and accomplishing nothing except ruining whatever international goodwill and leadership we had left. This isn't going to "save jobs" or "protect the American economy," it's going to slow us down in building a true 21st century economy with 21st century jobs. All this is doing is totally forcing cities, states and businesses, who actually largely do acknowledge the reality of climate change because it affects their bottom lines, to go it alone with no federal support at all. Good on business leaders like Elon Musk leaving their advisory positions too in protest.

We're on the wrong side of history now, and join only Syria and Nicaragua in not being part of this.

The problem from what I understand. It was rather unfair to the American people by putting all of burden on us and let other polluting countries slide for almost a decade. Instead of having all of us work on the issues at the same time. Oh BTW Wolf. Great Lakes Bay Region of MI had several locations making solar panels. *all* of them have shut down after a short amount of time. So Michigan hasn't gotten the "21 Century" jobs this accord would have provided. If anything we have lost more jobs than anyone.

This agreement, like others before it such as Kyoto, in no way put the burden just on the United States. That's a misconception, and actions are expected from basically all involved parties. If anything, the US is starting to seriously lag behind other developed countries when it comes to the issue of tackling climate change and related problems. And even countries like China are doing things (and a lot of them) to start reducing their emissions and other impacts. China's clean energy portfolio is growing extremely quickly while its use of fossil fuels like coal is dropping.

If I implied that this accord or anything else would somehow just simply provide 21st century then I definitely misspoke (mistyped?) What it would do is help set up the goals in order to point the way towards doing that, but the rest is going to come to a willingness to step up and make necessary changes to how our economy functions over time. None of this can or will happen overnight, because this problem, like most other world problems, is extremely complex with a ton of moving parts and unforeseen consequences out the wazoo. Coal companies were even on board with this accord in order to have a place at the negotiating table to keep coal as part of the worldwide energy profile. Most businesses and industries were entirely on board with this Accord. Oh, and most coal jobs that have been getting lost have been lost due to automation more than anything else, as is the case in many other industries in the blue-collar sectors.

Now that is still terrible about the solar plant manufacturing jobs being lost, but without really having details or context on that situation, there's not a lot I can say on that and I've no idea what may have driven the plant out, and there are a lot of possibilities. But that is one case...in other areas of the country, clean energy jobs are flourishing in mounting/manufacturing windmills or solar plants, in construction workers learning and building to energy efficient building standards and people increasingly weatherizing old buildings to more efficient standards, and many companies are looking for people with skills and knowledge in sustainability to clean up their operations throughout their (worldwide) supply chains. What we as a country do need to do is even things out more across the nation so that more people can benefit over time.

The Paris accord itself just sets targets, doesn't really dictate much policy and doesn't even start until 2020. Nations could even set their own targets. This is why I say that this move is likely to seriously damage our international standing - we could largely set our own goals, and now we're backing out of them.

Overall this problem has a lot of elements of the prisoner's dilemma going on, which makes it difficult to approach in general.

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